Katerina Semendeferi

Profile

﻿﻿﻿Katerina Semendeferi is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Neuroscience Graduate Program at UC San Diego. Originally from Thessaloniki Greece, she completed her graduate and postgraduate work in Biological Anthropology, Neurosciences and the program in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Iowa before joining the faculty at UC San Diego in 1997. Her research on the comparative neuroanatomy of the human brain explores neural systems involved in complex cognitive and emotional processes in humans, apes and other primates,as well as in human mental disorders. Semendeferi is the Director of the Laboratory for Human Comparative Neuroanatomy at UC San Diego.

Starting in graduate school Semendeferi initiated two large scale evolutionary projects. One project involved the coordinated effort to collect ape brain specimens from zoos across the U.S. following the natural death of the animals. The other project involved the application of structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging on the collected brain specimens and on living apes in collaboration with the Yerkes Primate Research Center starting in 1995. These initiatives introduced noninvasive techniques developed for the analysis of human neural tissue to the comparative study of the hominid brain and provided material that led to multiple studies published by her laboratory and others in the area of human brain evolution.

More recently Semendeferi’s research expanded to the study of selected human mental disorders (Publications), that affect aspects of social cognition including autism and Williams Syndrome (Salk Institute). The National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Leakey Foundation for the Study of Human Origins and the Kavli Institute of Brain and Mind at UC San Diego have supported her research over the years.

Semendeferi was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2012.

Although her specialization is in human comparative neuroanatomy and brain evolution, Semendeferi has been exposed to other approaches to the study of human evolution, including the fossil record. She was involved in archeological and paleoanthropological excavations in the United States, Greece, Romania, Turkey, and Vietnam and teaches courses on human evolution and the primate brain. She enjoys working with students and collaborators across fields.